Blah Blah Blah!
And this person is an Historian?
What a hopeless future looms ahead of us if we all become perpetual
students, learning one skill, only to replace it with more schooling
and another skill, and on and on and on...meanwhile wondering where we
will land our next job, and if it will cover the imposed cost of the
training that we will need to pay for, with little chance of paying
off this ransom before being forced into our next training program.
If there is any chance of this plan going forward, now is the time to
get in on the ground floor. The Jarvis Perpetual Preparation Academy
is now offering training in hundreds of soon to be obsolete skills.
And if you apply now, the training will be provided at half
price...since you'll probably only receive half the training before
you need to switch to the next, soon to be obsolete skill.
Yes, a fortune awaits the person who takes the first step into this new world.
Carl Jarvis
On 4/24/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Talk about dividing into silos or social blindness! This guy is talking
about people becoming life long learners so they can constantly retrain for
new jobs. He’s managed to ignore the fact that along with the off shoring of
jobs, many are disappearing because of technology. And he seems to think we
have a big financial problem because of unfunded entitlements. It’s escaped
his notice that most of our money is being used to fund a military that is
incapable of keeping us safe because all those Jihadists that he describes,
wouldn’t be attacking us if we’d just leave their countries and stop
dominating the world and its natural resources. And there’s all those
billions used to fund the many homes and yachts owned by the uber wealthy.
We could solve a whole lot of the world’s financial problems if the wealthy
weren’t allowed to keep all that wealth and if the tax system wasn’t rigged
so they can keep accumulating more of it. They can fund all those unfunded
entitlements that are worrying him.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard Driscoll
Sent: Monday, April 24, 2017 1:01 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Challenge of our Disruptive Era - Opinion -
WSJ 22 April 2017 - Ben Sasse
I ran across this and found the conjecture to be of interest to me and
possible others.
The Challenge of Our Disruptive Era
It is arguably the largest economic transformation in recorded history. Can
our politics adapt?
Photo: David Gothard
By
Ben Sasse
April 21, 2017 2:54 p.m. ET
309
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-challenge-of-our-disruptive-era-1492800857?mod=e2two#livefyre-toggle-SB11260320451415474002504583092762514384822>
COMMENTS
I am a historian, and that usually means I’m a killjoy. When people say
we’re at a unique moment in history, the historian’s job is to put things in
perspective by pointing out that there is more continuity than
discontinuity, that we are not special, that we think our moment is unique
because we are narcissists and we’re at this moment. But what we are going
through now—the past 20 or 30 years, and the next 20 or 30 years—really is
historically unique. It is arguably the largest economic disruption in
recorded human history. And our politics are not yet up to the challenge.
There have been four kinds of economies: hunter-gatherers, agriculture
(settled agrarian farmers in their villages), industry (mass urbanization
and immigration), and whatever we’re entering now. Sometimes we call it the
information-technology economy, the knowledge economy, the service economy,
the digital economy. Sociologists call it the “postindustrial” economy,
which is another way of saying “we don’t have anything to call it.”
What it really means is that jobs are no longer permanent. It used to be
that you did whatever your parents and grandparents had done.
Hunter-gatherers and farmers never even thought about it. There was no such
thing as job choice, only becoming 7 and 10 and 12 years old and taking on
more responsibilities to earn your keep.
Industrialization brought a massive disruption. At the end of the Civil War,
86% of Americans still worked on the farm. By the end of World War II, 80
years later, 60% of Americans lived in cities. One of the most disruptive
times in American history was the Progressive Era. And what was
Progressivism? Not much more than the response of trying to remake society
in an era of mass immigration, industrialization and rising cities. But it
turned out not to be as disruptive as people feared, because once you got to
the city, you got a new job, which you’d probably have until death or
retirement. And the social capital that used to be in the village tended to
be replicated in urban ethnic neighborhoods.
What’s happening now is wholly different. The rise of suburbia and exurbia,
and the hollowing out of mediating institutions, is an echo of the changing
nature of work. In the 1970s, it was common for a primary breadwinner to
spend his career at one company, but now workers switch jobs and industries
at a more rapid pace. We are entering an era in which we’re going to have to
create a society of lifelong learners. We’re going to have to create a
culture in which people in their 40s and 50s, who see their industry
disintermediated and their jobs evaporate, get retrained and have the will
and the chutzpah and the tools and the social network to get another job.
Right now that doesn’t happen enough.
Think about qualitative survey data—polls that ask, “What are the top three
or four things you’re worried about?” Ten years ago, nowhere on the top 10
of that list was anything about prescription drugs. Today opioids are a
major concern. People are scared about drug abuse in largely middle-aged
populations. That’s a symptom of the economic disruption.
I don’t mean to be exceedingly pessimistic. There are plenty of wonderful
opportunities for American families and innovators in this new economy. For
one thing, there are fewer middlemen complicating transactions instead of
adding value. So we’re going to get a lot more visibility and transparency
into product offerings, and consumers are going to get higher-quality and
lower-cost stuff.
In other industries, we don’t know how to price for things that turn out to
matter quite a lot. Think of the news media. We are going from a world in
which we had too much central control by a few large organizations, to one
in which everybody, everywhere can deluge us with information. What is
likely to happen next is not a lot more higher-quality journalism. We’re
going to have higher-volume journalism, and some of it will be good. A free,
thriving, and independent press is critical to self-government, so this is a
big challenge.
But people are also able to silo themselves into an echo chamber, where they
hear only things that they already agree with. More conspiracy theories come
to flower than ever before. You can see it on our college campuses, where
students don’t want to encounter any new idea without a trigger warning. If
you’re never going to encounter ideas that you didn’t already know and
affirm, I don’t know why your parents are paying tuition, because education
is all about wrestling with new ideas.
The political result is not just polarization, which is a big problem, but
political disengagement. If you think that the biggest problem in America is
the other political party and that your party has all the answers, if only
you could vanquish the other team from the field, I’ve got a lot of people
I’d like to introduce you to—because Washington doesn’t have very good
answers right now.
With the magnitude of the challenges we face in this moment of disruption,
it isn’t the case that one side is right and the other side is standing in
the way, or that one side is enlightened and the other side is retrograde.
It’s that we don’t have any of the right policy conversations. Most of the
really big challenges of this moment are not easily reducible to core
Republican or Democratic platform positions.
For one thing, we don’t have a national-security strategy for the age of
cyberwarfare and jihad. Since the 1640s and the Treaty of Westphalia, we’ve
had a view of geopolitics and national security that is about state actors.
There are lots of state-actor problems out there, including Russia and
China. But of the 200 or so countries in the world, only about two-thirds
really control all their territory.
The rest are more like Afghanistan, Syria or Libya. There may be some entity
that has more power than anyone else—think of the Taliban on the eve of
9/11. But we weren’t attacked by the Taliban; we were attacked by al Qaeda,
which exploited the vacuums of ungoverned spaces in the territorial borders
of Afghanistan. A lot of the dangers and the threats we face are from
jihadi-motivated people who are going to self-radicalize in place and create
their own terror networks.
We also lack seriousness about tackling the entitlement crisis. The
Republican Party appears almost as indifferent as the Democrats to telling
the truth about entitlements. People talk about the national debt, which is
approaching $20 trillion. But that’s just the total of intergovernmental
transfers and publicly held bond debt. The number that matters is the
unfunded obligations of the U.S. government, including future Social
Security and Medicare payments. It’s more like $65 trillion to $75 trillion.
And what about the policy implications of the economic disruption? The
cultural, societal, familial and social-network responses to a world of
lifelong learning and job disruption are far more important. But there are
many potential policy responses in education and job retraining. Are any of
these conversations on our national agenda right now?
What will the American idea look like when we get to this new, disrupted
world of the digital economy? What will entrepreneurship look like? What
will cultural pluralism and a robust defense of the First Amendment look
like? What will it mean to be able to say that the meaning of America is
still centered in institutions that look like the Rotary Club—where people
actually live, where they know and love their neighbors, and where they
actually want to do good, not just wear tribal labels about some distant
fight in Washington that isn’t anywhere near up to the task of the moment we
face?
That’s the challenge before us, and here’s the good news: Throughout our
history Americans have been optimists, ready to seize the day. Let’s get to
work.
Mr. Sasse, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Nebraska. This is adapted
form a speech he delivered to Colorado’s Steamboat Institute.
Appeared in the Apr. 22, 2017, print editio
